Form and the concept album: aspects of modernism in Frank Zappa's early releases.

Record industry executives need to find out what it is they're selling because, see, they don't know how important pop music is today. All they know is that that's what's making money this month. They really don't know what a revolution it is in terms of music history because there are a lot of people working in pop music today who are doing things that are artistic, and actually mean 'em that way!... I think it's living serious music!

--Frank Zappa, The Prank Zappa Companion: Pour Decades of Commentary

THE IMMEDIATE AIM of this essay is to analyze the content and form of three early albums by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention--Lumpy Gravy, Uncle Meat, and Burnt Weeny Sandwich--and demonstrate their affinity with certain works by Igor Stravinsky. It also seeks to advance a critical approach that views rock as a recorded art, and rock recordings as aural artifacts. Such analysis, according to a leading proponent, Paul Clarke, is based "on the complex of created relationships between sounds as they act on us through time." (1) The unusually wide range of musical sources and techniques Zappa incorporated into his recordings at this stage of his career raises a prior question: how did these albums figure into the cultural dialogue between rock and the changing experience of modernity in America in the 1960s? Let us address this question before turning to the analysis to place it into proper historical context.

The short answer is that by juxtaposing different musical genres, Zappa, who considered himself a composer foremost, was attacking the entrenched critical and academic establishments whose members distinguished categorically between art and popular music, particularly as regards structural and tonal complexity. (2) To paraphrase Carl Dahihaus, Zappa's was a music directed against the esoteric quality of art. (3) Popular music intended not for thoughtless consumption but careful listening also strained against the repetitiveness and standardization of Theodor Adorno's "consumer music." (4) By contrasting broadly different approaches to composition, moreover, Zappa was implicitly rejecting the kind of hairsplitting that set the "modernist" music of composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez apart from more accessible "avant-garde" works by John Cage and other so-called experimentalists. (5)

Zappa was not alone in striving for this kind of pluralistic synthesis. Indeed a number of self-styled modernists were welcoming the eclecticism of contemporary art in sixties popular media. Susan Sontag, for example, waxed enthusiastic about the lowering of barriers that had formerly separated high from low, past from present in an essay first published in Mademoiselle. (6) Although Zappa probably held a similar opinion, he could not help giving it a satirical twist, drawing upon sources disparate and sometimes vulgar enough to exceed the bounds of even the most broad-minded critic's good taste.

Unlike Sontag, Zappa's intent was hardly theoretical. Neither did he seek to create a truly unpopular music with "no commercial potential," a label a Columbia Records executive once hung on his work to which he often referred. (7) Rather, as he repeatedly stated, his albums were market products designed to appeal to record buyers searching for the newest sound, the latest protest music, the most outrageous novelty. So he balanced his instrumental music with songs, the lyrics of which mostly satirized the manufactured fads and fashions of contemporary America. Never mind Zappa's serious and well-known involvement in all phases of record production, marketing, and promotion, or professed willingness to reap whatever profits came along--We're Only In It For The Money is the title of one of Zappa's early albums. That was part of the put-on. Zappa's early recordings were indeed "music about music," (8) but they were also parodic popular critiques of the mass media, advertising, and the consumer culture that sustai ned them all, designed to sell in volume.(9)

With respect to the place of Zappa's early recorded output in theoretical discourse, it should be obvious that his musical borrowings and uses of collage and quick-cut techniques were never ambivalent--they always had a point. Thus since Zappa's early work in no way anticipates the ahistoricity, ironic detachment, and playful depthlessness characteristic of postmodernist quotation, it could be classed as modernist. (10) There is more to support this label than mere wordplay, as I shall argue below. Indeed, careful listening reveals an attention to form--the organization of recorded sound in time--that places the three albums discussed in this essay uneasily (and perhaps consciously so) into the tradition of twentieth-century musical modernism. Before examining this hypothesis, Zappa's early work needs to be put into the larger context of sixties rock and its connections with modernism.